Category: Reviews & Criticism
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In the Awakening Season, a Tupelo Press / Leapfolio poetry collection by Matthew Mumber, reviewed by David Epstein
“If medicine were my spouse,” Matthew Mumber posits, “I would ask politely / if we could have a long-overdue chat.” It’s possible to understand many of these poems as a transcript of such conversation. Mumber, an oncologist, has given us a three-part book of thirty-eight poems in some sixty pages. The strengths of this collection…
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Ancestry, a short story collection by Eileen O’Leary, reviewed by Julia Breitkreutz
In her short story collection Ancestry, Eileen O’Leary invites us into the lives of characters who are searching for a sense of belonging in a world which she reveals to be often void of authentic human connection. We witness the futile attempts of an over-eager college student in “Adam,” as he desperately tries to form…
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The Trouble with Language, a TRNSFR Books debut fiction collection by Rebecca Fishow, reviewed by Maxwell Malone
Rawness, strangeness, and unpredictability have been nearly universal facets of daily life in 2020, and, in that sense, Rebecca Fishow’s debut collection, The Trouble with Language, couldn’t have come at a better time. Rife with explorations of self-alienation, desire for purpose, disconnects, and detachments, the thirty pieces of prose poetry, flash fiction, and short fiction…
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“Normal as a Coke and a Candy Bar”: Dave Karp Apprises the Insistently Angry Voices of Joel Felix’s Poetry Collection Concealed Nations
Male anxiety, embarrassment, and rage; pervasive fear of the world around you and insistence on controlling it; naked cynicism and impotently blinkered idealism, with all the economic, political and technological pressures that activate them—Concealed Nations, a new book of poetry by Joel Felix, brings all these to life and suggests how they horribly, oppressively cohere.…
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“Post-digital Kenosis”: On Jake Reber’s ambient body horror ZER000 EXCESS (11:11 Press)
I. What would happen if you ran all our systems of signification through a large hadron collider? The result might be something like Jake Reber’s ZER000 EXCESS—the result would frighten us. What follows is our attempt to come to grips with this work, one which denies us the refuge of conventional meaning structures … II.…
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Tom Griffen Responds to Francesco Levato’s Arsenal/Sin Documentos, a Clash Books poetry title
Francesco Levato’s Arsenal/Sin Documentos is poetic investigative reportage, if there is such a thing. It’s a genre-less amass of official US documents, such as the Customs and Border Protection’s Use of Force Policy, the US Patent paperwork on Hand-Held Stun Guns for Incapacitating a Human Target, the Department of State’s Celebrate! Holidays in the U.S.A.,…
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Magnolia Canopy Otherworld, Erin Carlyle’s debut poetry collection, reviewed by Nicholas Rys (Driftwood Press)
Carlyle’s full-length poetry collection is as full and rich of naturalistic and surreal imagery as its title suggests. The book is a haunting exploration and a portrait of what it means to grow up as a girl and woman in the forgotten South. Here, characters shuffle in and out of drug clinics, go down to…
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How It Looks Away from Here, a Ravenna Press poetry collection by Joan Fiset, reviewed by Robert Dunsdon
A girl, around eight or nine years old perhaps, and tightly wrapped up against the cold, stands motionless on a small trampoline. She got here having walked on duckboards across an uneven and muddy yard from what looks like a shabby barn. Who she is and what she represents, if anything, is anyone’s guess; she…
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Esteban Rodríguez on Alen Hamza’s CSU Poetry Center debut collection Twice There Was a Country
Winner of the 2019 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Competition, Alen Hamza’s Twice There Was A Country is a collection that reminds us that regardless of the past or the circumstances we find currently ourselves in, it’s never too late to reconnect with who we are and where we came from. While Hamza’s…
Heavy Feather Review 